“Your OSM Heat Map” (aka Where did you contribute?)

by Pascal Neis - Published: August 14th, 2011

Last week Stephan released the neat “Where Did You Edit?” webpage. A world map indicates where in the world you have been editing OpenStreetMap (OSM) nodes. Unfortunately it is based on a full history OSM planet dump which is nearly two months old. Also, the map does not include any tools to zoom into or drag the map. However, Stephan mentioned that he is working on these functions. Keep up the good work, Stephan!

Based on my OSM changeset table of “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap ?” I created a slightly different webpage and used a different approach. I used the weekly OSM changeset files and I presented the results in an OpenStreetMap including zoom and drag functions. Your contributions are indicated by a “Heat-Map-Overlay”. For this overlay I am using Bjoern’s OpenLayers addon. For better performance I generalized the total changesets of each OSM contributor. This means that it is possible that not every little contribution from a member is taken into account and displayed in the map. Anyway, I think the results are quite impressive, aren’t they?

The following picture shows the heat map of Harry’s OSM contributions. Really nice! But honestly: Harry, did you visit all places in person? 🙂

29 Responses to ““Your OSM Heat Map” (aka Where did you contribute?)”

Is it also possible to turn this off for specific users? Not everybody wants to have one’s edits traceable in such a way. This could produce data protection issues when edits reflect a person’s movements.

Thx for your comment. Well in a certain way I would agree but OpenStreetMap is an Open project in the end. You can find the same data that I used in the maps in your OSM wiki page. Did you know this? Here you can see an example taken from my profile: http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/pitscheplatsch/edits

So in my opinion it is not really a “new” visualization of the movements of OSM contributors, but ok: If you really want it, I can delete your username from my database. It is up to you. But pls, think about the other nice websites which use “your” OSM data …

Thx! Some OSM contributors have more then 10 000 or 20 000 changesets. Rendering these changesets as heat map points would cause performance issues in the web browser, thus I “generalized” the changesets. This means that I only used changesets whose size varied between roughly 1 and 30 km for the first version of this website. I didn’t want to visualize the work of an import/bot or very small edits, but wanted to focus on the visualization of the area of an OSM contributor. Up to now, this works fine in a first version. For the next version I will try to expand the changeset sizes a little bit.

Ale,
By submitting data to OpenStreetMap, anyone can download the data and see where you submitted data to OpenStreetMap. Though, it is not immediately updated once you have been there (you have to make the edit to OSM first), so this can’t be used to follow anyone. Also, the stalker has to know your OSM user name to look up your heat map.

My home page shows a map with “mappers around you” markers. This is pretty useless, because most of them have never edited OSM. Can you create a better infographic that highlights only active contributors, with more graded colors to show their relative strength?

Such a display will encourage networking and collaboration between such active mappers.

Hello, Pascal. How does your tool handle users that change their usernames? Does it update some kind of cache regularly?

I have changed my username to the one a old account of mine was using, but I can see only the edits for the old account. The new name of the old account is not found by the tool and the old name of my active account is not found too. My real edits ended up in some kind of limbo 😛